Saturday, 27 December 2014

I have been further pondering the
reasons why I really do not like more modern wagaming. By this I mean that I
have never, in fact, wargamed anything seriously (insofar as wargaming can be
serious) later than the Napoleonic period, and that was only because I was a
guest. All right, I have, somewhere, stashed away, some very old microtanks. I
can only plead teenage ignorance for that.

Still, I do feel somewhat
uncomfortable with games from, say, the start of trench warfare onwards. The
reasons for this might be manifold, of course, and I can think of a few, but
overall I suspect that there is one overriding reason.

Let me deal with the lesser
reasons first. To start with, wargaming in World War One has often been thought
to be boring and lacking in tactical interest and finesse. I do not think this
is a particularly good argument, largely because it is not terribly true.
Granted, there were only limited options for getting men from these trenches to
those, but the war shows immense grappling with how to do it effectively.
Innovations such as poison gas, tanks, hurricane bombardments and mining all
showed efforts to solve the tactical problems of the mastery of defence.

A second objection to twentieth
century and later wargaming is that it is not pretty. Armies had (mostly) gone
to ground and were wearing field grey, khaki and similar uniforms. Even
American Civil War armies had colour, it could be argued. A World War One game,
on the table, simply looks a bit dull, because that was the effect the armies
were looking for. As an objection to the period this is, I think valid.
Compared to a full blown Napoleonic game, a First World War one is simply not
going to have the same visual appeal, and visual appeal is part of the wargame.
Of course, this is a matter of taste, and mine might not be yours. On the other
hand, the aesthetic quality of a game is not the sole determinant of whether it
is worth playing.

Of course, we could go on with
these sorts of objections. I am sure there are many more which could be bought
against any particular period. For example, Second World War wargaming tends to
focus on the tank, with its problems and opportunities. Much of the fighting,
however, was between troops where the tank was of less use or, in some cases,
was simply a liability. Another problem, which I have mentioned before, is the
simply range of the weapons. A tank gun is accurate up to (say) two thousand
meters. That needs a big table at any scale. Artillery ranges, of course, are
even longer. This can, of course, be handled by ‘off the table’ guns, but given
the intrinsic appeal of models, where is the fun in that?

None of the above, however, are
the reason why I recoil somewhat from these games. I suspect that the real
reason is related to the issue of what is known as ‘total war’. This is a term
which begins to be applied roughly from the American Civil War onwards. It
describes a situation where the countries at war are regarded as fighting each
other, not just the armies, rulers or governments. Total war requires the
employment of all the resources of the state to defeat another state. Given that
this is the case, the war is conducted against civilian populations as well as
armed forces.

We can see this in a number of
ways. For example, the British defeated the Boers by rounding up the civilian
population, denying the enemy the protection and support they needed for a
guerrilla campaign. Similarly, Germany declared an open submarine campaign to
try to starve Britain into surrender. The target here were not combatants, nor,
in fact, necessarily British merchantmen, but any ship sailing to Britain. The
nascent bombing campaigns towards the end of the war were similar cases, and
these things simply grew in the Second World War.

Total war, therefore, is a
matching of state against state. Economies are placed on a war footing. Civilians
are targeted deliberately, as the production facilities and government capabilities
are attacked. Furthermore, the advent of truly industrialised killing, through
high explosive artillery and machine guns made the casualty lists incredibly
much longer. I seem to recall that the casualties at Waterloo on all sides were
about 47,000. The British army lost 60,000 on the first day of the Somme. Total
war pushes our ability to wargame, I suggest to its limits.

I am not saying that we cannot
wargame such battles as the Somme. I know that there are many sets of
innovative rules which permit such actions to be played at the tactical, grand
tactical and strategic levels. It is not, I think, a matter of whether such
games can be played, but what is represented when they are played. For example,
the Somme was only possible due to a huge effort of production and stockpiling
artillery shells before it. Without that, the battle could not have begun. Is
this to be represented in our wargame?

The answer to that question is
dependent on the level at which we are gaming. But the question pulls other
questions in. Do we represent the air raids on defenceless civilian
populations, which might reduce the rate of production? Do we simply ignore the
supply problem, assume that our guns have infinite supply and distort the game
another way? These and many similar
sorts of questions have to be either tackled 9in which case our rule book is
going to be massive) or tacitly ignored. In short, total war is vastly complex
as well as devastatingly bloody. How can a wargame represent, even in part, the
problems of the real armies and nations?

Most sane people, of course,
ignore these problems and simply play a wargame. But the underlying uneasiness
seems to be still there. There is a slight defensiveness from, for example,
players whose armies are the World War Two Germans. I suspect that this is
because, whatever the claims to the contrary, the army was involved in some of
the other acts of the German government, if only because it was defending the
nation from some of those acts being stopped.

I am not sure I have advanced my
thinking much, here, but I have tried a little. I do think that there is some
mileage in the concept of total war, and that, probably, we try to wargame such
conflicts too simply. But I’m still not sure.

Saturday, 20 December 2014

This is actually my second
attempt at a festive post. The first was written when I was tired, cynical and
had spent the week sitting in traffic jams, and turned out to sound very bitter.
So hopefully, this is a bit lighter.

Actually, I want to challenge the
readership. It isn’t a quiz, because I do not know the answer, but I would like
some ideas.

My local garden centre has, this
year, started stocking Airfix models and some figures (they have also started
on Hornby train sets). Being a wargamer, of course, I keep an eye on what they
have, but not being a WW1 or WW2 wargamer, I’ve never bought anything.

This week, however, I did notice
that they have World War Two Italian infantry and World War Two Gurkhas on
special offer, at a mere two pounds a box. They have a few other things as
well, like a Churchill Crocodile tank for four pounds, but the infantry caught
my eye.

The question I have for you is
this: Which theatre could I use both for? Did Italians and Gurkhas ever meet? If not, is the a reasonable and logical ‘what
if…’ campaign in which they could, assuming that I can obtain enough figures to
represent, say, a company of each?

I am not saying that I will dash
out and buy the figures, but I was just wondering and, not be an expert of
World War Two, I thought I’d challenge the assembled company. There is, of
course, no prize, except the normal internet kudos, but I shall nominate the
best comment, and also the funniest.

And in the meantime, a very happy
Christmas to you all, and thank you for reading and commenting.

Saturday, 13 December 2014

I have just finished reading ‘Empire’
by Niall Ferguson (Penguin, 2003). This is, of course, slightly outside my comfort
zone as I do not, generally, wargame or read history post 1800, or even post
1700, assorted rants about World Wars One and Two aside.

Anyway, ‘Empire’ is a good read,
and even rather amusing in some places, but it does make a point which had not
really considered before. That point being that Africa was largely colonised at
the muzzle of the Maxim machine gun. A bunch of, say, Fuzzy-Wuzzies were not
going to overcome the machine gun in any sort of fair fight. The Boers only did
so relatively well because they had modern weapons (the Germans sent them to
cause trouble, in which they succeeded).

This got me around to thinking
about the colonial period of wargaming and problems associated with it.
Firstly, of course, there are all the problems of asymmetric wargaming, which
can be an inspiration but can also cause problems. By asymmetric here, I do not
think I am meaning quite the same as modern asymmetric warfare, where one side
is a bunch of insurgents and the other is a regular army with firepower but
struggling to contain civilian deaths (something which does not bother the
insurgents, as all such deaths can be blamed on the regular army).

By asymmetric, therefore, I mean
one, small army with high firepower against one, probably much bigger army,
largely without modern weapons. Of course, scenarios can be created of ambush,
or small parties of well-armed regular against ever increasing numbers of
native, and so on, which can make for a balanced wargame. Similarly, inventive
supply rules can keep the modern army on tenterhooks as to whether they will
survive or not. Somehow, there is always the possibility of balancing up the
game.

On a larger scale, of course, as
already hinted, the carve up of Africa was mainly an issue of European power
politics. Outside bits of the British Empire, most colonies cost the coloniser
money, as well as lives and resources, and did not really produce that much.
But the point of, at least the scramble for Africa was prestige, of doing down
your European rivals, blocking them strategically, and so on. After all, the
British were heavily involved in Egypt because, strategically, it guarded the
passage to India. German policy before and during the First World War was to
create sympathetic Arabs who could cause the British problems here. It more or
less did not work, but it was an issue for the British.

As Bismarck once remarked, his
map of Africa ran through Europe. No African was present at the Berlin
conference which carved up Africa into European zones of influence and
basically meant that the Scramble for Africa was on. And so our colonial
wargaming, in general, springs from this sort of viewpoint. Professional
armies, with the latest weapons, can simply go into some native area and seize
it, mowing down anyone who objects with a machine gun. Quite often, of course,
this movement into native areas was provoked by the fear that another European
power was about to do the same thing.

So, colonial wargaming is
predicated on European power politics, and those power politics are, in fact,
the same ones that led to the outbreak of the Great War. As most wargamers are
probably aware, there were, in the twenty years or so preceding the Great War,
a number of colonial incidents which could have led to the outbreak of war
between the colonial powers. That they did not is probably simply a matter of
luck.

The issue here, then, perhaps
begins to press on our ethics of wargaming. Is a colonial wargame, of spears
against Maxims, as fair fight? Is it really something that we wish to reproduce
in loving detail on the wargame table? At Omdurman (1898), according to
Ferguson, 52,000 Dervishes took on 20,000 British, Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers.
In the following five hours, around 10,000 Dervishes died; possibly ninety five
per cent of the Dervish army were casualties, while around four hundred on the
Anglo-Egyptian side were killed or wounded. Fourth-eight British soldiers were
killed. Can we ethically reproduce this carnage?

The problem here is, in part, the
motivation of the original participants. The Dervishes were brought into
action, and remained there, through religious devotion. The British were there
for revenge, as the expedition was at least in part a response to the death of
Gordon. I think it is rather hard for us, as wargamers, to reproduce such
motives on the table. The result of this is that a wargame of Omdurman becomes
a clinical exercise in mowing down natives with machine guns.

Of course, with clever scenarios
and rules we can change this. We can, for example, make the Dervish objectives
simply to do better than the originals. We could challenge them to kill more
Europeans, or to reach the river, or whatever. By doing this, of course, we
could argue that we are no longer recreating Omdurman. We could also argue that
we are giving the Dervishes a chance. But is that chance not one imposed by the
colonial power, inviting our noble but lesser opponent to try a bit harder,
safe in the knowledge that the machine gun will always win?

I am not suggesting that all
colonial wargaming should cease until these ethical problems are untangled, and
nor am I claiming to have answers to these issues. But I do think it is worth
acknowledging that such issues do exist, that wargaming does not exist in a ‘game
bubble’ which bears no relation to the past or to its interpretation in the
present. While wargaming is a leisure activity, it is not as such immune to
such issues.

Those of us (and I may be alone,
of course) who struggle to think that a wargame of the first day of the Somme
could be in strict good taste should, perhaps, also reflect that Omdurman might
also be tasteless. Just because the Victorians said they were savages does not
mean that is how we should see the Dervishes. The casualty rate was appalling,
just not in ‘our’ (western? colonial?) men.

And perhaps, finally, I can
understand why none of my own armies are post-1713.

Saturday, 6 December 2014

Well, ‘tis the season of
something or another. Actually, it is Advent, or near enough, which does raise
the question of why the world, in its commercial aspects at least, has been
doing Christmas since early September. I did see some research which suggested
that Christmas now started in mid-August, having moved back a month since 2007.
Mind you, this did depend on, I think, twitter feeds and statistics. Which
either means that the world has gone Christmas mad, or that Twitter is
unreliable, or that there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Or some
combination of these, of course.

Anyway, I digress only to raise
the question of when to break out my ‘Keep Calm, its Only Christmas’ mug. It
would appear that I am some months too late. And I would also like to point out
that Advent is actually a fast, like Lent, and is not supposed to be a months
long knees up. Someone told me the other day that people she knew put their
trees up so early they took them down before Christmas Day, because they were
fed up with them. Sad, but let it be a warning to us all.

Anyway, the other season has been
the season of Remembrance. I thought it was a day (or possibly two, since they
moved it to the nearest Sunday and then moved it back), but apparently it is
now officially a season. And, it being the centenary of the First World War
breaking out, there has been a lot of First World War about. Indeed, one
commentator I read (I forget whom) noted that all conflicts seemed to have been
conflated into the First World War. Perhaps that is a uniquely British thing.

The centenary has also influenced
the wargaming world. Around the shows, on blogs and manufacturers web sites,
World War One has been popping up all over. Refights of the battles and new
figure line are, so far as I can tell, all over the place. This strikes me as
slightly odd, as for years, when I was a lad, World War One, at least on the
Western Front, was deemed to be unplayable.

Now, of course, things have moved
on. Rule sets have been written to enable the gamer to play out some of the big
battles of the Western Front. Innovative techniques in rule creation, in
assessing the effects of barrages and so on have been used. The scale of the
figures has been shrunk, so that a base might represent a battalion. The level
of abstraction has been increased beyond the imagination of a 1970’s gamer (at
least, beyond my imagination; that may not be very hard). The games can be
played. So why do I not like them?

I suspect that part (but only
part) of my problem is the ‘Oh what a lovely war’ syndrome. By this I mean that
the historiography of the Great War that I was bought up with was that it was a
war fired by nationalism and jingoism (with a dash of social Darwinism thrown
in), that the battles were pointless wastes of blood, and that the whole thing
was a disaster fuelled by idiot politicians and incompetent diplomats, an
international treaty system which ensured a Europe-wide conflagration, and an
utter failure by the armed forces leadership to recognise the realities of
warfare.

Even though this picture may well
have been nuanced over the years, it is still clear that it does hold a lot of
historical weight. There might be arguments over the ‘lions led by donkeys’ thesis,
which argues that any officer over the rank of captain was incompetent, or
whether the Allied armies were actually really good by the end of the war, and
so on, but it is clear that as the first really modern war, the mass slaughter,
howsoever it occurred, was exactly that.

And so, I return to the level of
abstraction that World War One requires on the wargames table. As far as I can
see, casualties are not inflicted. Units might be disrupted, supressed, or to
have gone to ground. Artillery barrages might devalue the defence. Machine gun
emplacements might degrade the opposition. But the men are not blown to bits;
they do not have no known resting place because the ground upon which they fell
has entirely removed any trace of them. The wargame table fields are not filled
with stones engraved ‘A Soldier of the Great War Known Only to God’. In short,
the necessary level of abstraction removes us, as wargamers, from the
individual experience of the carnage of the First World War battles.

Now, of course, it can be argued that
any wargame does exactly that. We rely, as I have probably repeatedly mentioned
on this blog over the years, on a degree of abstraction, otherwise we could not
wargame at all, either practically or emotionally. All wargames are, to some
extent, sanitised, of course, and much of the violence is abstracted away. So
what, for me, makes World War One an no-no?

I am not sure that there is a
single answer, and nor am I sure that I have a consistent one. For me, the
historiography of the war is about the horror and intensity of the fighting.
Replacing that with nice markers for ’suppressed’ on a battalion caught by artillery in an open
field is pushing the bounds a bit too far. I think also that the season of
Remembrance also focusses on that carnage and, for me, makes it harder to play
a game without imagining the effects of my barrage on the ground. Earlier wars
may have had their share of horrors and outrages, but the battle lines did not
spread over hundreds of miles.

Finally, perhaps I have been too
influenced by the poetry and prose in response to the war. Siegfried Sassoon
and, in particular, Wilfred Owen portrayed the war as a senseless slaughter of
ordinary men. Even more so, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That showed the perceived
disaster of the war, and is engrained in my interpretation of it. Finally, and
most devastating, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ simply makes the battles
unplayable. When the book ends with the statement ‘He died on a day that the
high command simply reported at it was all quiet on the western front’, what
can a wargamer do? In my case, I simply don’t go there.

Saturday, 29 November 2014

There has been some discussion
recently about the top down and bottom up views of rule writing, and the
implication of this for the design and functioning of the rules themselves. I
suspect (and will attempt to show) that this is a cultural thing, or possibly
just another case of the ‘scientific worldview’ invading other areas.

So far as I recall, the bottom up
view of rules was the first out of the blocks. Certainly, I remember reading, I
think in Charles Grant’s ‘The Wargame’ comments about speed of movement. These
were along the lines of a normal person can walk at about four miles an hour on
a flat, level, hard path. Thus a unit can move however many inches determined
by the ground scale and time scale of the moves. This, again as I recall, is
arbitrarily reduced to something reasonable, on the grounds of having to keep
in line, the various bits of a unit having to march around blackberry bushes
and so on.

So this is a bottom up design of
movement rules. We take an individual and assess his capabilities. Then we work
out what implications there might be of loading him up with eighty pounds or so
of equipment and expecting him to keep in line with his fellows. Even then, we
obtain a number which might be a long way from anything with is either
reasonable in wargame table move distances, or historically verifiable. Units
moved slowly, relative to an individual.

So, of course, Grant (and he was
not alone; he is just the author I remember) was well aware of this and fudged
the results. In the end, then, it could be argued that despite his explicit
bottom up approach to rule writing, he resorted to a top down approach to get
the ‘right’ answer.

Such trajectories could be
multiplied. For example, there were results of tests around (from, I think ‘Firepower’)
of shooting muskets at unit sized sheets, and working out the effectiveness.
Despite the author’s charges to the effect that this was an absolute, theoretical
maximum, I fear some wargame rules dived in with the idea that muskets were
something like 60 – 80% effective, and the body count in wargames rose as a
result. Even though the effect of being in battle, being under fire,
accidentally shooting out your ramrod and so on were commented upon, rule
writers took the headline figure and worked with it.

Now, the people who did these
things were not stupid. The thing is that they look as if they are scientific. We
all like numbers; they give such an air of authority. A recent incident at work
indicated this rather well. A student had done a very nice project and got some
clear qualitative data. This was insufficient for her supervisor (who really
should have known better) and she was told to do statistical analysis to prove
the point. The problem is that statistical analysis on qualitative data is,
well, asking to have the numbers made up for you. But numbers have authority
where words do not.

Part of the reason for this is, I
think, the success of science. Science give numbers; when I was a student you
would derive a formula and then ‘plug the numbers in’ to get the required
answer. Of course, what everyone knew and tacitly ignored was that the numbers
were made up to make the answer pretty. As with so much, even at an
undergraduate level, the experiments and problems are fixed so that they ‘work’.
That, after all, is how science is supposed to be.

Real life, however, is messy. As
an experimental physics researcher, plugging the numbers in became a game a bit
like accountancy. If you ask an accountant what the values of a fund is, one of
a set of possible answers is ‘what would you like it to be?’ So it is with
experimental physics. The question is not ‘what is the answer?’ but more along
the lines of ‘how can we get an answer, and how reliable might it be when we
have it?’ Numbers, even the outcomes of equations, give us spurious confidence.
As someone told me once, ‘it isn’t the answer that is interesting, it is the
error’.

So, in wargame terms, we are
probably better in going top down, in looking for how a body of men actually performed
under battle conditions, be that in movement, shooting or whatever else. This,
too, has its dangers, of course. Firstly, the evidence is, to put it politely,
patchy. Mostly it does not exist. Where it does exist, we are probably back to
those parade ground performance figures which are a guide to a perplexed young
officer, but not much use to the old hand sergeant. He knows from experience,
and it is not written down in a book.

The problem is, then, that we can
neither be purely top down nor purely bottom up. Our records of unit
performance are based on individual observations, and may not be valid for all
units, let alone all times and space. Top down views are therefore contaminated
by, at least, particularity. This unit did this in this battle, so we universalise
an individual performance. Of course, bottom up is no better. It takes no
account (except through fudge factors, as already noted) of emergent behaviour
and bears even less relationship to real life than a top down approach.

But perhaps the major difficulty
with the top down approach is the fact that such views of the world are frowned
upon, culturally. Science, or at least the perceived method of science, is
king. And science is irrefutable (nearly) reductionist, and hence bottom up.
The ‘Great Chain of Being’ with everything in its place from worms to slaves to
women to men to angels and then God himself has irretrievably broken down (I’m
not saying that this is a bad thing), and the legacy of that is that everything
now has to be bottom up.

Saturday, 22 November 2014

One of the dangers of western
ways of thinking is that of essentialism. We start to think that there is some
essential property of something that is shared by all the somethings to which
we give the same name. Thus, we think that there is some underlying notion of,
for example, a wargame, that is common to all wargames; there is some essence
of this thing that is a wargame which is in common with that thing which is
also a wargame.

The problem with this is, as I
might have alluded to before, that it is very difficult to see what this thing
in common is. For example, a historical wargame involves some sort of
simulation of combat in a historical setting. Science fiction wargaming
involves some sort of combat in a non-historical setting. Role-playing games
can be regarded as a sort of wargame, but do not necessarily involve combat.
Board games have a setting (usually historical, but not always) but the combat
is usually abstracted to a table and a dice roll. Yet all these things are
wargames of some sort. Do they really have anything in common?

Of course, the other way of
looking at this is that the use of the word wargame defines it. Thus, there is
no essence of a wargame at all. If the community determines that it is a
wargame, then a wargame it is. Thus, all sorts of things can be ruled in or out
by simply looking at the word in the context of how people use it.

This too is fine, and indeed a
lot of the philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition has been based around
this idea. It originates from Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations.
His example there is of the word ‘game’, and he points out that there are loads
of definitions of ‘game’ and it is hard to see what they have in common except
being described as a game. For example, a soccer game and a game of solitaire
with cards are both called games. It is hard to see what common ground these
have; both could be called ‘pastimes’, but, of course, there are professional
soccer players. One is competitive and one is not. And so on.

So, in the more narrow focus of a
wargame, we can examine what we mean by that and attempt to decide, perhaps[s
as a community, or at least by listening to the community, whether something is
a wargame or it is not. Of course, there will be grey areas. Chess, for example,
is often described as a wargame, or at least wargaming is described as chess
with a thousand pieces. Often wargames have an element of chance build in,
which chess does not have. So, is chess a wargame?

We can go further. Why do some
businesses run ‘wargames’? Are they wargames which the wargaming community
would recognise? Almost certainly not. The conflicts that business wargames are
concerned with are not what most hobby wargamers would recognise. There may be
some vague organisational similarity, in terms of having sides and umpire,
goals and some sort of rules, but the goals and outcomes are different.

Of course, this can run to
narrowness in a different sense. A wargame is what I determine a wargame to be,
as I am the wargaming community. Thus what I do is a wargame, what you do might
be a wargame and what they do is not. You can see this around the place. I
wargame properly with my 25 mm Napoleonic armies and detailed rules and
beautiful terrain. You might wargame, with your tiny 15 mm modern figures and
some sort of rivet counting random rules. They cannot be wargaming with their
role playing, no figures and scraps of paper to record stuff. Plus they seem to
having way too much fun.

This relates back to what I was
trying to say a week or two back about the discourses of wargaming. What a
wargame is conceived to be is, of course, a part of the particular discourse a
wargamer has. To have a discourse at all is, by the nature of discourse, to
rule some things in and some things out. Once I start to say something I close off certain routes, certain things which
I cannot now say without contradiction or inconsistency. So, for example, if I say
‘wargames use miniature figures’ I have already ruled out board and computer
games as being what I mean by a wargame.

The situation is, of course,
slightly worse than that. My Napoleonic wargamer, above, could stand accused of
simply criticising the ‘Other’, the mass of people he does not understand. As
he has ruled them out from his community, they are simply there as a potential
object of ignorance or derision. By the nature of the discourse (and, quite
likely the discourse of the role playing gamers, as well) there is an implied
decision not to engage, not to see what it is about, to draw lines of
demarcation as to what a proper wargamer might be about.

To some extent, by human nature and
the nature of our language, this is inevitable. As I said, by saying something
we rule some things out, and we have to say something or we cannot create a
community at all. But language is often a lot more flexible than our categories
of thinking allow. In fact, a bit like the universe, language is infinite but
bounded. There are loads of things I can say, many of them intelligible which
can break the categorization of which I, as a human, am so fond.

So I think it is beholden on all
of us to examine our own discourses of wargaming (including, of course, this
one). The powerful narratives of what we think a wargame is are such as to
marginalise at best, other sorts of wargame which might prove to be enriching.
It is to exclude, or worse, to try to silence other voices that might be worth
hearing. And, possibly, to relate back to one of the more popular posts on the
blog, it might be why I no longer buy wargame magazines.

Saturday, 15 November 2014

I suspect that most of us, at
some time or another, think that we could do better than some wargame that we
have just seen. If only, we muse, I had a bit more time, I could paint those
toy soldiers, create that terrain, write those rules better, more clearly, more
authentically, and the whole thing would come together to provide an aesthetic
and satisfying experience, which, perhaps, provides also some deep insight into
a historical battle.

This aspiration, of course,
remains simply that. Even if we did have more time, the perfect wargame would
be out of reach. We have to settle, as finite beings, for the good enough,
something that is sufficiently satisfying, aesthetic enough, and so on. We are
both empowered and constrained by our language, for one thing. We can only
think certain things, as those things we cannot think about we cannot
articulate.

I am currently reading Rowan
Williams’ ‘The Edge of Words’ (2014, Bloomsbury). This is not a project I have
undertaken lightly, as the good former Archbishop of Canterbury has a certain
reputation for impenetrability and, I have to confess, I have read occasional
bits of his former works and emerged from as bemused as I went in. Anyway, thus
far, The Edge of Words has proved to be a lot more readable than I was
expecting.

The point here is that at one
place (p. 57-8) Williams muses on our inarticulateness. A scientist moves the
subject forward, he suggests, by puzzling over discrepancies. This is not a
stimulus response mode of language, although the scientist is usually dealing
with objects that do respond in that mode. What is meant here, I think, is that
the scientist usually deals with such things as rocks, which when thrown behave
in certain ways; these ways are independent of the scientist observer.

Within the stimulus response
mode, then, there is no role for inarticulateness, but in the development of
science, there is. Some scientific phenomena are not immediately intelligible.
Indeed, one of the biggest tasks that science, as a whole, faces is making its
deliverances intelligible, either within the scientific community or, what is even
harder, in the wider community who, after all, foot the bill for most scientific
research.

However, such bafflement with
language is not limited to science. We have probably all found ourselves ‘lost
for words’. Williams’ example is that of Cordelia at the beginning of King
Lear, who cannot articulate her love for her father. That love cannot be tied up in words to
satisfy the King’s need for love. There are, at least, some things we struggle
to say.

Moving on, we can note that, of
course, King Lear is fiction. The point here is that in a play (or, I suspect a
film or even a football match) we cannot intervene. For example, in Terry
Pratchett’s Weird Sisters there is a highly amusing bit where one of the
character does intervene in a play they are watching, indicating the guilty
party in a murder mystery and shouting ‘He done it!’ (or words to that effect).
The humour is in the fact that the corpse is not a dead body, the murderer didn’t
hurt anyone and intervention is from outside the world of the fiction. In
Williams’ words ‘And so I am brought face to face with what I do not want to
grasp or apprehend – my own limits as they border on the limits of agents who
are absolutely and inaccessibly other.’

And so to wargaming. In a wargame
the figures, the scenario, the rules and so are, in fact, other. It was
suggested recently that a good analogy for a wargame would be a football match,
and I agree. In a football match, the players and referee are other. I, as a
spectator, can do little to influence the match. I can cheer or boo, but that
might make me feel that my views are, at least, heard (or that I articulate
them) but that has little or no influence over the outcome. It is unlikely that
the referee will reverse a decision over a penalty just because a section of
the crowd is catcalling him.

However, I think that one of the
engaging features of wargaming that makes the analogies of film, play or match
strain is, in fact, that as wargamers we are involved. Our decisions influence
the outcome of the game. If I decide not to move the Grenadier Guards into line
and thus the attack stalls, that is my decision affecting the game. In this
discourse, taking language in a wider sense than just words, my actions
influence the outcomes on the table.

Thus, alongside the fact that I
am cut off from the activities on the table by the intervening layers of rules
and models, I am also involved at quite a deep level. The words I use about
table-top activities also imply that. I do not refer to ‘The French Grand
Battery’ but to ‘My guns’. The relationship is mediated, admittedly, through
the interpretation given to my actions and activities through the rules. The
situation I am responding to is modelled on the table top, and that feeds back
to me as decision maker. But the bottom line is that as a wargamer, I am
involved in the table-top activity. It may be other, but it is also influence
by me.

Those of you with very long
memories might recall that I proposed a three layer model of a wargame: the
real world of the player, the mediating layer of the rules, and the wargame
table layer of the game. Again, this seems to work in this sense, except that the
model does not seem to reproduce this level of involvement. This personal
involvement, incidentally, seems to be what worries those few who regard
wargaming as glamorising war (or have similar viewpoints; I’ve written quite
enough about that previously). But the involvement of the players is a vital
part of making a wargame worthwhile.

So, perhaps, we could regard a
wargame as analogous to a film or football match, but we would have to admit
that, even in the latter case, our involvement in a wargame is more intense,
has a bigger influence on the outcome and, (to purloin a footballing phrase) at
the end of the day is more personal.

Saturday, 8 November 2014

I have been reading, for no
wargame related reason, a book about the problem of housing in rural areas in
the UK. The problem is, as you can probably guess, that the prettier rural
areas suffer from wealthy people moving into them, buying up the housing stock
and forcing the prices up. The poorer paid local people and their children thus
cannot afford to live in their local area anymore and have to either move to
urban areas and commute back to their poorly paid jobs on the land or hope for
some low cost housing to be made available to them.

The essay on housing, however, makes
some interesting comments about the power of discourses over our views of rural
housing. The dominant discourse is that the countryside is to be protected, and
this is agreed by everyone, indigenous rural population, incomers buying up
farm houses, planners and politicians.

The policy of protecting the countryside
benefits some of the people above. Thus, for those who can afford to move to
pretty country villages, it ensures that property prices stay high and their investment
remains valid. They can claim that the communities they move into do not suffer from
urbanisation because their pressure keeps development at bay. It also gives
local planning officers, local politicians and national figures something to
do, in that they seem to spend a fair bit of time considering planning
applications for huge sprawling edge of village or town estates that no-one in their right mind is
going to accept.

The interesting thing about this
discourse of protecting the rural landscape, communities and way of life is
that everyone, whether in one of the benefitted groups or not, accepts it. The
rural poor, who would in fact benefit from more housing (thus being cheaper)
and bigger local towns (bringing more jobs and amenities to a nearby location)
are just as clear about not wanting development as the richer, more powerful
voices. In short, the discourse of protection has been swallowed, hook, line,
and sinker.

Now, while this might be an
interesting debate over the rural landscape, I think it does pertain to wargaming.
Not, I hasten to add because there is any sort of politicking going on in
wargaming; I think it is too disparate for that, but because I do think there
are some dominant discourses within wargaming which the hobby might benefit
from examining.

I dare say that I have banged on
about a few of these discourses over time, but it might do no harm to have
another bash. Writing the blog, in fact, trying to describe my own ideas and
thoughts on the subject and also to see what others think.

I think my biggest beef with most
wargaming, at least of a historical nature, is how out of date much of the
history is. Wargaming generally seems to be stuck with its sources in the A. H.
Burne and Sir Charles Oman. Now, don’t get me wrong, both did sterling work in
their time to write history, and specifically, history of conflicts, in an
appropriate manner for their time. But historiography does move on, and I
cannot really believe that I am the only wargamer who gets frustrated (and
possibly slightly depressed) when I see another article or demonstration game
which is based on their interpretation of the sources.

For example, the battle of
Neville’s Cross is, for a medieval action, quite well documented. But the most
recent wargame interpretation of it was exactly that from Burne. Burne seems to
have been unaware of some of the sources (not necessarily his fault). The
upshot is, of course, that we present to ourselves, and to the public who might
have a look, a wargame which has little relevance to the actual original
conflict (insofar as we can know it) and also little relevance to modern
research and consideration of more recent concerns. In short, our discourse of
wargaming here is woefully out of date.

Now, we might argue that this
does not matter, because the game is the thing. However, the devil is, I think,
in the detail. If we claim that the wargame is historical, should it not be so
to the best of our ability? We can comment on the niceness of the figures, the
accuracy of the heraldry and so on, but when the action on the table is based
on an account of the battle written nearly a century ago, some question over
its actual historical accuracy might need to be raised.

Often, I think, well-meaning
wargamers fall for these powerful discourses. We want our battles to be full of
colour and activity. The line of least resistance is to take down Oman from the
shelf, leaf through to the relevant chapter, and start recreating the battle.
But we recreate Oman’s view of the battle, which is likely to have been superseded.
Oman, fine writer as he was, is not the
last word on the subject; it is not that hard to find more modern accounts of
battles and the circumstances leading up to them. In the case of Neville’s
Cross, the differences can be significant.

So I think that one of the
discourses which silences some wargamers, in the same way that powerful
interest groups silence the rural poor and actually make them agree to things
which are not to their benefit, is that the game is the thing and that historiography
does not change that much. This argument implies that the interpretation of the
sources can only be the same today as it was nearly a century ago. Thus, all we
need to do is to make a table that looks like the present state of the
battlefield, bang out a few nicely painted figures and, bingo! we have a
historical recreation.

Present company excepted, I am
sure, this does seem to be the dominant view among a significant set of
wargamers. It might not even matter that it is historiographically impaired.
But as a discourse that potentially silences other voices, other ways of wargaming
and more recent historical research, I think recognising that it does happen
might be a helpful thing.

Saturday, 1 November 2014

I may well be repeating myself
here, but I would like to ponder something that has come up again in recent
discussions here. The thing is, in a wargame, we are taking multiple complex
reactions to a human (and very stressful) situation, breaking them into models,
and then reassembling them into some sort of intelligible, usable whole to play
a game.

I think I would like to leave
aside, at least here, the ethics of doing this. I have considered them
elsewhere, but I do confess that the above description of what we do in a
wargame makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. However, I shall simply ignore
that for the moment and consider the actual problems of the reductionism that
we employ and the possibilities of reconstruction that we hope for.

So, firstly, reductionism. We
have a set of accounts of battles for a particular period, say, plus our
imaginations and a framework for what we can produce as a workable model and
what we cannot. So, for example, I know that my model, in order to be
intelligible and tractable, is going to have to result in some sort of
arithmetical operation, a dice roll for a bit of chance and some sort of
outcome based on the numerical result. This may not be the only way of
resolving wargame events, but it is the most usual one. We could call it a
paradigm model of event resolution.

Now, in our accounts, in our
imagination, various factors come into play. The men, for example, might be
confident or treacherous (think about Bosworth, for example). The leaders might
be, or might be considered to be, competent or not, careful with the lives of
the men or not, and so on. The weaponry the armies are issued with might be
effective or not; the tactics employed could be such as to amplify or supress
the usefulness of the weapons or not, and so on.

I think the issue here is that,
in real life, these things are all presented as a mass. Generals, I guess, do
not go around thinking that if only they deployed their archers in hollow
triangles they might be more effective. These things are largely dependent on
tradition, training and other things that happen off the battlefield. Generals,
deploying their armies, have to use what they are given. The men are armed in a
certain way, trained in a certain way, have a set of conceptions and
expectations about themselves, their comrades and leaders, and, probably, the
enemy as well. But these are all of a mass; the men, their officers and
generals do not necessarily split them into different categories.

Furthermore, of course, all these
ideas and conceptions interact. I might be confident in the performance of my
long bow, but nervous about the fact that my sergeant is incapable of hitting a
barn with his bow, or that there seem to be an awful lot of Frenchmen about
wearing heavy duty armour. Thus, my confidence, which might be high in one
sense, could be low in another, and dependent on my own mental outlook and
physical wellbeing (the fact that I have dysentery might add or subtract from
my confidence). In short, there are all sorts of factors making up the outlook
of one individual and, of course, many individuals whose outlook is a factor
both in my individual outlook and in some emergent outlook of the unit, or the
army, as a whole.

There is no way in which this can
be handled as a whole, I think. In order to make a set of wargame rules work,
we have to reduce this mix of personal outlooks, physical capabilities and so
on to a set of models which reproduce certain aspects of the whole. Thus, I
have a given model for the effectiveness of the bow. I have another model for
the impetuousness for the French knights. I have yet another model for the use
of crossbows in a skirmishing role, and probably another for the effectiveness of
crossbowmen ridden down by those impetuous knights, and so on.

In short, what I have done is
taken all the formally distinct bits of the world of the archer before
Agincourt, and turned them into separate models. The thing is, though, that
those models are only formally distinct. How well the ‘real’ archer shoots
might well be a function of whether he thinks his weapon is effective at a
given range against a given target, as well as his state of health, how
confident (or scared of) his leaders he is, and so on. The different models in
fact represent different bits of reality that we can think about separately. Reality
itself is unitary.

The next step is to model these
things as arithmetic calculations. This introduces another level of
abstraction. The simulation is now grainy. Reality tends to be more gradual,
more graded than simply reaching, or not, a numerical threshold. As wargamers
we have to accept this as a consequence of attempting to wargame at all.
Although there are sudden collapses of units, usually this is the cumulation of
a set of circumstances and events in the recent past. While a sudden bad dice
roll might reflect this, it also washes out that slow disintegration of the
individual and communal morale.

Now, we attempt to put these
models together in some sort of order, to reflect the reality which they are
trying to simulate. But note that we have, in fact, changed things
considerably. The continuous and fairly smooth behaviour we witness in real
life has been replaced by a step-wise and clunky function depending on dice
rolls, among other things. The integration of a person, their environment and
world view has been replaced but a set of models for each of them, hopefully
statistically derived for a mass of people. And so on. The models we use only
reflect some formally distinct aspects of the reality we try to model.

We do, of course, gain some
advantages. The models we use are tractable and intelligible. If a unit runs
away we can give reasons, which the real life equivalent might struggle to do. But
we do need to be aware of the things we have to sacrifice to obtain that
intelligibility and tractability.

Saturday, 25 October 2014

As regular readers might be
aware, I have had a couple of wargames recently, trying to test out the rules I
am supposed to be writing (more like mouldering in a computer file, in so far
as computer files can moulder). I was not terribly impressed after the first
one; Alexander seemed to win really easily and the rules simply ‘felt’ wrong.

Upon reflection, I decided that
there were some issues. Firstly, in the first battle, I had simply whacked onto
the table every Macedonian and Persian base that was painted with little regard
for historical accuracy and balance. As a consequence, I hypothesised;
Alexander had far more Companion style cavalry than he should have had and had
thus won far too easily.

Secondly, there were command
problems. Neither side had enough tempo points (roughly translated for you
non-Polemos players out there as ‘command points’) to get most of their troops
into action, or even to get them moving. Now, while the accounts of the battles
of Alexander may well be biased, they do not claim, in general, that only the
forces under Alexander’s direct command were in action at all. So, something
was not working quite right.

Finally, at least as far as my
ponderings went, the rules just did not behave as I wanted them to. Now, those
of you who have read Poiemos: SPQR (don’t worry, this is not a commercial
break) will know that I classified troops there as ‘formed’ and ‘unformed’.
This was an attempt to capture and model the fact that the ‘barbarian’ tribes,
the enemies of Rome, did not line up in neat ranks and march in step. The
Romans and some of the other Eastern Mediterranean cultures did that, granted,
but the Celtic and German tribes did not (mostly; there are some hints in
Tactius that the Germans might have started to do so).

Applying that directly to
Alexander’s battles, however, just did not seem to work. Unformed troops are
harder to get moving in SPQR than formed ones, but are more devastating on
first impact than the latter. This, so far as I am any judge, seemed to work
for modelling tribal foot against legions, but simply seemed to fail with
phalanxes and Persian foot and hoplites; Alexander’s early battles could be
described as “hoplites on both sides”).

I did, so far as I am able, sit
and consider this problem for some time between the first and second battle,
and eventually I came to the conclusion that, at least, the name was wrong.
There was much less distinction between the formations in Alexander’s day than
there was (even with wargame rules and their pardonable exaggeration) between
the legions, auxilia and tribes a couple of centuries later or so.

I also considered that what seems
to have been important at the time was not the actual deliverable fighting
prowess of the troops, but their reputation. Somewhere in, I think, Thucydides,
a bunch of hoplites pick up some Spartan shields and march on. No-body bothers
to stop and fight them, assuming that they will lose anyway. Similarly, I think
there is a story of Spartans using non-Spartan shields and their opponents
running away when the truth was revealed. If anyone can quote me chapter and
verse on these I would be grateful, but I think I remember correctly.

Anyway, the idea of training also
seems to have been something of an anathema to the Greeks. While individuals
did train a fair bit as individuals and individuals weapon skills, there does
not seem to have been much in terms of unit training. Thus, I hypothesise, these
units might be competent in action, but slow to respond to unit orders, simply
because it might take longer for commands to filter down and be acted upon.

So, whereas Polemos: SPQR has
morale and formation as its unit specifiers, at present Polemos: Polemos has
reputation and training. The second wargame proved to be a more comfortable
affair for me as the wargamer. Most of the troops got into action; defined
mainly as of average reputation and as trained, the command points cost of even
moving the phalanx was not excessive, and it rolled nicely over the Persian
foot while Alexander’s cavalry was crushed by the opposition. However, Alexander
himself, unscathed, managed to form a flank guard to check the triumphant
Persian cavalry with a bunch of hoplite mercenaries while the phalanx finished off
the Persian centre. At the point I ran out of time the action, while not
finished, was going the Macedonian way.

So, was this a simple name change
of a particular facet of the game which made it feel better, or more
comfortable? Was it a deep change in the structure of the rules which improved
the outcome? Indeed, was the outcome improved when Alexander’s Companions went
down under the weight of Persian horse?

I am not sure I can answer any of
those questions, of course. It was a simple name change, but that name change
actually changed the behaviour of a lot of the troops on the table. However,
referring to the troops as of average reputation and so-so training meant that
the rationale for getting them moving in the first place sounded better. It
also meant that the peltasts, unformed but trained mercenary, could behave like
peltasts and not like some really hard to get going untrained peasantry.

Finally, of course, there is the
question of luck. In the first game Alexander was lucky, in the second his luck
only came to the fore when the Companions went down with him attached and he
managed to ride away unscathed. Perhaps, on that basis, there is not much more
to be said. After all, Napoleon is reputed to have asked of his opponents ‘are
they lucky?’. Furthermore, I suppose that my tactics as Alexander were fairly
well ‘hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle’ for the cavalry. While that
might work for the phalanx, it does not seem to be how the man handled his heavy
cavalry.

Nevertheless, the wargame felt
better, whatever that means. The language was more appropriate, the command
rules meant that the generals could do stuff, albeit within limits. So somehow
an improvement was achieved.

Saturday, 18 October 2014

In an unusual move for me, I have
actually just ‘had a battle’ (to use Mrs Polemos’ expression), or, to put it
another way, I have just wargamed. Specifically, the battle was between my new
and shiny later Persians, and my slightly less new (but still quite shiny) Macedonians.

The terrain was entirely flat,
and the troops were entirely average, as I wanted to test my putative Polemos:
Polemos rules, which are, as you probably already know, aimed at warfare in the
Classical Greek and Age of alexander era, whatever we might decide to call it.

I meant to get pictures, but
never the wargame and a charge camera battery shall meet in my case. I thought
the armies looked rather splendid, however, and their deployment was reasonably
conventions. Thus, on the Macedonian right, there were some light horse, then
the Man himself with six bases of Companions (in two lines), followed by two of
peltasts, six bases of pike in a line one deep in the centre, two more bases of
peltasts, three bases of Thessalonian horse and then four bases of light horse.
Six bases of skirmish infantry covered the front of the phalanx. Fairly
conventional, as far as Alexander goes, anyway.

The Persians started on their
left with two bases of light horse, then six cavalry, four up front and two in
reserve, the Great King (just the one) followed by a front infantry line of
eight bases of Persian infantry, with four of hoplites behind. The right was
five bases of cavalry, three up front and two behind, then two bases of light
horse on the extreme right. In front there were six bases of skirmish foot and
two scythed chariots. Again, fairly normal, I suspect, for the Persians.

Now, what happened was that
alexander won the tempo, advanced his skirmishers and cavalry. As the lights
got to grips, the Companions got into Persian charge range. The Persian horse,
sensibly (possibly) refused to charge, whereupon Alexander did so. On the other flank the Persians charged the
Thessalonians, routing two of the bases. The Companions smashed up the Persian
horse and then disposed of the reserve, which the Great king had just joined.
In my mind I had decided that if the Great King was killed or routed, the Persians
automatically lose. So they did.

I sat for a while pondering this
outcome. In a way, the result of the battle was entirely historical, at least
in vague outline. The armies line up. Alexander charges a perceived weak point.
The Great King flees and the Persians collapse. If you wanted a summary of the
great Macedonian – Persian battles, that would, pretty well, be it.

The reason I sat and pondered,
however, was the thought that although the outcome had been historical, I was
not sure if it was a good wargame or not. The whole battle lasted four turns,
or about forty minutes. Arguably, as I have said, it had a historic outcome.
But the infantry on either side had not moved an inch (or base width, in this
case).

However, I did feel that a bit
more action, a bit more drama, even some ‘clashes along the hole line’ were
called for before one side or the other streamed away in disorder. Now, of
course, I could, as the Persian, have fought on but, to be honest, there did
not seem to be much point. With six bases of heavy cavalry sitting on their
flank, the Persian foot and hoplites were not going to put up a major fight,
particularly if Alexander had got the phalanx moving forward. In fact, the Macedonian
lights were slowing gaining an advantage over their enemies anyway, and the
Persian morale, having taken losses and lost the general, was going to get
flakier. So it was a correct call, in my view, to concede.

But I think the wargame does
raise a question. Is a good wargame the same as a historical one? As I say, the
outcome was arguably historical (even down to the Thessalonians having a hard
time on the other flank to Alexander). But I am still not sure if it was as
enjoyable as I would have liked it to be.

Pondering further, I could see
the crucial point of the battle was at the point where the Persian horse
refused to charge the Companions, while the Companions did charge the Persians
in the next bound. On the other flank, the Persians got the drop on the
Thessalonians and were winning. This of course raises further issues for the
wargame rules: is it all a matter of luck on a few crucial dice throws?

Another consideration is that of
bias. I do not think my rules are biased towards the Macedonians, nor do I think
my set-up or orders favoured them. But as a solo gamer, am I biased either for
one side or against the other? I tried hard, in fact, to be biased against the Macedonians.
Being lazy I tend to stand on one side of my table or the other, and the near
side tends to win. So I stood behind the Persians all game, and they lost.

Now, there are a number of
possibilities left. Firstly, the Macedonians do (at least in what I have
painted) have a lot of heavy cavalry, but under the rules as they stand at
present they are no different from Persian cavalry. So it was not that.
Secondly, as the Macedonian, I had a plan, which was pretty well Alexander’s
plan, while as the Persian I am not sure I did, at least, not a specific or
quick one. The Persians wanted to clear the way for their scythed chariots to
hit the phalanx while delaying on the flanks. Like a football team playing for
a draw, this was a dismal failure.

So, did warfare of the time
favour the attacker? Do my rules? Does fortune simply favour the brave? Is any
quick plan better than no plan? Have I painted all those Macedonian and Persian
foot in vain?

Saturday, 11 October 2014

Yes, I know, a title that takes
pretentiousness to new levels of ultra-bizarreness. But bear with me, there
might be something interesting below.

By some measures, metaphysics is
not a popular subject in modern western philosophy. This might be something to
do with the influence of Heidegger (or, as the Epictetus blog described him
recently, “the tainted Heidegger”. Well, OK, he was, at least, a Nazi sympathiser.
But then, so were a lot of other people). Heidegger, of course, was not a fan of
metaphysics, to the extent that he spoke and wrote an awful lot about it. I
think this might be an older manifestation of the Streisand effect, whereby
attempting to ban something simply draws attention to it.

Anyway, metaphysics is rather
sniffed at these days, which is a bit of a shame because eventually most things
can be tracked down to metaphysical presuppositions. Science, for example, does
not do metaphysics. If you run into an atheist scientist (and they do exist)
then, if you track back far enough, they will often simply claim that the laws
of nature are a brute fact, a given, arbitrary, about which we can say no more.
Now, obviously, this is to an extent attempting to admit either ignorance about
the origins of the laws of nature, or an inability to define said laws (which
is not as easy as we might assume) or a last ditch attempt to avoid metaphysics
and the ‘G’ word. But the conclusion that the laws of nature are simply brute
facts is a metaphysical one. There is no evidence to suppose that it is the
case, it comes from a presupposition.

Similarly, in fact, science uses
metaphysical assumptions in carrying out its day to day activity. The
assumption is that the physical world is regular, intelligible and predictable.
These things may have been shown inductively to be true, but as Hume pointed
out centuries ago, there is no justification for induction, and any attempts to
do so have failed. Of course, most science is massively indifferent to this;
most scientist are just trying to get their experiments to work, write the next
paper and grant application and not worry about ultimate justifications.

In the determination not to worry
about ultimate justifications and the presuppositions which they might rest
upon, scientists have much in common with wargamers. After all, the
presupposition of a wargame of any description is that the universe is, in some
senses, explicable. If someone is shot at with a musket, a ball will likely fly
in their general direction and there is a chance that it will hit them and
disable them. We assume that this is the case, without a huge quantity of
justification except that we know, somehow, that it is the case. The presumption
of regularity in the universe is metaphysical.

In fact, recent historical
research suggests that modern science would not have come into existence
without Christianity. The presumptions of Christianity are that the universe is
intelligible, regular (because guaranteed by a good God) and that part of our
activity as humans created in God’s image (whatever that might actually mean;
don’t get me started) is to try and understand it. Many early scientists were
people of faith, such as Roger Bacon and Robert Grossteste. Without Christianity,
modern science might not have got going.

But I digress. I am trying to
examine here what I might have referred to before as the framework assumptions
or the conceptual archetypes of wargaming. I think that we can probably assume
that wargaming, in common with more or less every other human activity, takes
some metaphysical items pretty well for granted, such as the regularity of the
physical world and the validity of induction. Without that, wargaming, let
alone anything else, would not have got going.

So what other assumptions are
made in order to have a wargame at all? I think that possibly the main one is
that there is an interplay of chance and necessity. As I said above, if you
pull a musket trigger, you have a reasonable expectation that a bullet will
come out of the other end of the gun, that it will fly in the general direction
in which you pointed it, and that it will do some damage if it happens to hit
something or someone. But note that the sentences are hedged with conditionals –
it might do some damage if it happens to hit something.

Thus the elements of chance are
introduced into the game. Few wargames operate entirely without chance
elements. Most use dice, but it is not obligatory. I seem to recall that HG
Wells used matchstick firing cannon, and I’m fairly sure I read somewhere about
entirely card driven games. Whatever the mechanism, we recognise that despite
the necessity of some effects occurring given certain causes, chance is also a
factor in war and, even more so (because we cannot model every level of human
decision) in wargames.

At the risk of reinforcing my pretention
credentials, I think I would want to classify such presuppositions in wargaming
as metaphysical. I think that such assumptions are made, tacitly, in most, if
not all wargames. Stuff happens. There are causes and effects, and sometimes
things go a bit awry, but not so much that the awryness cannot be accounted for
by chance or awkward human decisions. Hume, after all, argued that we only link
cause and effect because that is how we link them together. His claim is that
cause and effect are only due to our habits of associating the events. Of
course, this is another metaphysical claim, and this from a man who argued that
all books of metaphysics should be burnt.

In sum, I think that we should,
as wargamers, try to be aware of some of our basic assumptions in holding a
wargame at all. I am not really arguing that we should hold the laws of cause
and effect, or the laws of nature in mind when wargaming (that way, I suspect,
madness probably lies, and I do not wish to be held responsible for a decline
in the mental health of the wargame community), but I do think that, from time
to time, an investigation of what those assumptions are, and their validity,
might be a good idea.

Saturday, 4 October 2014

I have, perhaps, hinted before that wargames, wargame rules
and wargamers do not really tolerate uncertainty. This is one of the issues
there is with respect to wargaming which is one of the most difficult to
tackle, both in general and in particular. So I thought I would give it a go,
not really expecting to make much headway.

It seems to me that there are at least two issues at stake
here. Firstly, there is the creation of fictitious forces in our wargame
armies. What I am thinking of here is, for example, “morale”. Morale is often a
critical element in our rules and plays a key role in the outcome of battles.
But it is one of those things that does not exist, at least to a reliably
measurable extent.

In a set of wargame rules morale is generated as a mathematical
model, but it does not behave like that in real life. A person with a clipboard
does not pop across to the 25th line battalion and have a survey of
how the lads are feeling. Morale is a
construct of those who report of warfare, perhaps, but it is perhaps more
eminently a construct of wargaming. In perhaps over-technical language, we can
stand accused of reifying morale, taking a concept which is useful to our games
and making it concrete to suit ourselves. It could be argued that morale, at
least as it occurs in most wargames, simply does not exist.

Another issue which occurs, which needs a concrete answer
which cannot be given, is that of armies and order of battle. I have
(remarkably) finished (insofar as any wargame army is finished) my late
Persians, all 34 bases of a 20 base army, including two Great Kings in their chariots.
Why, you might ask, two Great Kings? Well, firstly, of course, I had the
figures. You might object that there was only one Great King at a time, and I
would be forced to agree with you. But which Great King is the real Great King?
Obviously, the one who wins the next battle…. The reason I had two Great King
chariots was because one came with the early Persians and one with the late
Persians, and I had never bothered to paint up the one for the earlies because
the Great King was not present at Marathon.

Anyway, having now finished the Late Persians, I am now
considering moving on to the Classical Indians, the ones who fought Alexander.
Here, of course, information runs very thin. Our sources do not say a lot about
the Indians, because they were exotic, far away and, by the time anyone got
around to writing about them, they had reconquered themselves (as it were) and
no-one was really interested in people who were on the far side of a hostile
empire (with respect to looking from Rome, anyway).

So, much of what we do know about the Indians is
conjectural, inferential and, if you do not mind a bit of sarcasm or rudeness,
frankly invented, or at least it has alarmingly little evidence to back it up.
Clearly, there is some evidence, contradictory as it is. The Indians had
archers, a few swordsmen types, javelinmen, cavalry, chariots and elephants. They had what usually passes in ancient
sources as ‘lots’ of these. At Hydaspes they had somewhere between 200 and 50
elephants, according to Sabin’s reporting of various modern reconstructions.

Here, again, the wargamer has to do some reification (have
you ever wished you had not used a word like that?). We cannot do, as historians
can, with a hand wavy ‘we don’t really know, does it matter?’ sort of response;
nor do we particularly wish to move on to more interesting subjects such as
Alexander’s sexuality (at least, I do not; classical scholars might demur). We
need some sort of concrete number. Sabin makes a middle of the road estimate of
85 elephants in Porus’ army. He might be right. How do we know?

Now, you might argue, if you had read this far, that my
claim of reifying morale in rules and my claim about doing the same for troop
numbers in armies are two different things. To some extent I would agree with
you, but in fact what we are doing in both cases is making something up to
cover over something we cannot measure.

We cannot measure morale, so we make some sort of model up
to cover the fact, and use that as the morale of the army, unit or whatever,
even though it has no measurable equivalent in real life.

We cannot measure the number of elephants at Hydaspes,
because time machines have not been invented so we cannot go and count them,
the reports we have (at second or third hand) from people who could have counted
them are contradictory. So, essentially, we have to make a reasonable guess.

The problem is, in both cases, unless we make these guesses –
a guessed model for morale; a guess at the number of elephants present – we cannot
really have a wargame on a historical basis. It simply cannot be done unless we
invent these things.

Thus, we have to make concrete these things in a wargame in
order to model them. We need a concrete model of morale in order to measure it.
We need concrete (or is that lead?) models of elephants to show a given number
of pachyderms in real life. These things have to be concretised in order to
make the game work at all.

Of course, you could argue that it is only a game anyway and
so it does not really matter, and, as a game, of course that is correct. As an
imaginary encounter, we can deploy however many elephants we like, and we
could, if we so wished, dispense with morale rules entirely, or simply make
something outlandish up.

But then I suppose the worry would be that we have cut the
final links between reality and human reason and the activities modelled on the
wargame table. Even imaginations have some real world logic involved.

Saturday, 27 September 2014

“In a very different
subject-matter, Napoleon supplies us with an instance of a parallel genius in
reasoning, by which he was enabled to look at things in his own province, and
to interpret them truly, apparently without any ratiocinative media. ‘By long
experience’, says Alison, ‘joined to great natural quickness and precision of
eye, he had acquired the power of judging, with extraordinary accuracy, both of
the amount of the enemiy’s force opposed to him in the field, and of the
probable result of the movements, even the most complicated, going forward in
the opposite armies… He looked around him for a little while with his
telescope, and immediately formed a clear conception of the position, forces
and intention of the whole hostile array. In this way he could, with surprising
accuracy, calculate in a few minutes, according to what he could see of their
formation and the extent of the ground which they occupied, the numerical force
of armies of 60,000 to 80,000 men; and if their troops were at all scattered,
he knew at once how long it would require for them to concentrate, and how many
hours must elapse before they could make their attack.’” (Newman, J.H., An Essay
in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, (2013 [1870]) Assumption Press, p 219).

I have to confess, that that was
a somewhat unexpected paragraph in Newman’s book for me, at least. In the
passage in question and its surroundings, Newman is pondering the nature of
genius. He observes before it that, for example, Newton had a tendency to
simply write down answers to mathematical physical problems without working
them out or proving them. It then took several generations for the rest of the
academic community to catch up and prove that he was, in fact, right. I believe
that someone once claimed (with what accuracy I am unsure) that for every time
that the mathematician Carl Freidrich Gauss wrote ‘it is obvious that’ or ‘clearly
it follows that’ or similar phrases, someone has obtained a PhD for showing it
to be so.

Newman continues after the
passage just quoted: “It is difficult to avoid calling such clear presentiments
by the name of instinct; and I think they may so be called, if by instinct be
understood, not a natural sense, one and the same in all, and incapable of
cultivation, but a perception of facts without assignable media of perceiving.”

The problem is this: as ordinary
human beings, we have little idea of how geniuses proceed, and, in general,
cannot cope when they do. If Napoleon was a genius at warfare, it is little
surprise that his opponents, no matter how competent, struggled to cope with
his manoeuvers. Even Wellington was humbugged by the Corsican, even though the
latter was not at his best during the Hundred Days. The fact that the Allies
won and Napoleon lost was due more, perhaps, to Wellington’s planning and
positioning of his forces during Waterloo, and the Prussian ability to support
him than any military genius on their side.

All through history we can see
military geniuses, alongside those in other fields, turning received wisdom
upside down and winning battles, or solving problems, in ways that were thought
impossible. On the military side was can name, for example, Marlbrough,
Alexander, perhaps Caesar, Hannibal, Scipio and so on. Some others might be in
the running as well, such as Gustavus Adolphus or Maurice of Nassau, but in
general I am sure you can see my point. The geniuses were not coped with by the
normal military institutions of the day. Until those institutions adapted to
cope, victory went to the genius.

This then is a problem for wargaming.
Unfortunately, few of us are geniuses; perhaps fortunately, most of us will
never need to get involved in major warfare for real. But the problem is how
we, as wargamers and wargame rule writers, can cope with these geniuses who upturn
the conventional wisdom of warfare. For a set of wargame rules, almost by
definition, must represent the normal, conventional warfare of the time.

There is an additional problem,
of course, in that we have a splendid dose of hindsight to add to the mix. When
Napoleon is facing the Allied army at Waterloo, we might want to explain to him
the fact that most of the enemy army is over the ridge and a grand battery, no
matter how grand, just is not going to cut the mustard. We also might like to
point out that the army closing in on his right is not reinforcements but an
army he thought were thoroughly beaten. Thus there is here a question of epistemology
(to give it an overpoweringly posh name). Napoleon may not have known these
things; somehow he had lost control of the campaign.

The issue is, in terms of wargame
rules, firstly, that of course Napoleon, if he had been aware of these facts,
might have taken different action, although the politics might have made this difficult.
These are issues beyond a simple set of rules to deal with. But the real
problem is, if I may call it such, the ontological one of genius. The being of
a military genius on the battlefield cannot, I think, be handled as it is
mostly by a ‘+2’ on the command rolls, or some other sort of fudge factor to
enable the wargame to come out in a vaguely historical manner. The genius who
can just ‘see’ the solution, the Marlbrough who marches half an army across the
battlefield to obtain tactical surprise, cannot be subsumed within a simple
addition to a command rule or radius. These rules and their fudging simply do
not reflect the process of the genius winning the battle.

I do not think that there is in
fact, any legislating for such genius. Firstly, even Napoleon had feet of clay,
or at least had to odd off day on the battlefield. If we construct rules for military
genius, then we would also have to construct rules for the genius not having
had his morning coffee. And that way, I think, wargame rule writer’s madness
lies. Secondly, genius is, well, genius. It tends to operate outside the box,
which would mean, more or less, it might well operate outside the framework of
the rules. And I cannot think of a rule set that can allow that.